POUND VS. REDUCTIONIST ORTHODOXIES€¦ · geological fronts and climaxed in the "Omphalos" debate. One side of the argument held that since Adam was created directly by God, he didn't

141

POUND VS. REDUCTIONIST

ORTHODOXIES

Carroll F. Terrell

ー

"All systems of philosophy fail when they attempt to set down axioms of the theos

m terms of consciousness and logic" 〔SP,50〕．

"I do not expect science ... to lead us back to the unwarrantable assumptions of

theologians" 〔SP,50〕．

"To replace the marble goddess on her pedestal at Terracina is worth more then

any metaphysical argument. And the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere recall

a wisdom lost by scholasticism, an understanding denied to Aquinas." 〔SP,320〕．

"A bloated usury, ... a disgusting financial system, and the sadistic curse of Chris-

tianity work together," to exploit the planet earth and turn mankind into "milkable

human cows" and sheerable sheep "lest the truth should shine out in art, which

ceases to be art and degenerates into religion and cant and superstition as soon as

it has taxgathering priests ... " 〔SP,430〕．

Following the fragmentation of the Roman church during the reformation, a number

of protestant sects were spawned. A few such as Lutheranism in Germany, Calvinism

in other places, and Episcopalianism in England became as highly dogmatized and

centralized as the Roman church itself. Others became evangelical and passionized:

they rejected ritual and sacrament and in their stead celebrated the feeling of being

saved. Nobody questioned the existence of God. But with the growth of astronomical

science, the earth came to be seen not as the center of the universe but only an unbright

cinder bombinating in the contiguous void of some random galaxy. After Sir Isaac

Newton, man became not just a little less than the angels but closer to the primordial

slime. And after Descartes and the growth of laboratory science, questions about the

nature of God and finally even the existence of God came into general discussion among

the literate.

Reacting to this new kind of science, Voltaire said: "If there were no God, it would

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be necessary for man to create one." In context, he meant to suggest man had done

just that and had attached to the nature of this diety all the passions, weaknesses, and

jealousies of man himself. Reacting to the hither-and-yon flurries evoked by Voltaire's

statement, Dostoevsky said: "If there were no God, it would be necessary for man to

create himself." Deliberately, he left the sentence hanging thus in order to imply the

impossibility of such a thing and to add a fillip to Aquinian arguments about a first and

efficient cause. During the last half of the 19th century, everybody who was anybody

had much to say on the subject. Their arguments were founded on the orthodox dogma

of various Christian sects on the one hand and on the other vague intuitive feelings

called by Benjamin Jowett, "the tones given off by the heart." In the 1880s, Nietzsche

faced Dostoevsky head on and said, in effect: "Since there is no god, the time has come

for man to create himself because he is still closer to the apes than to the truly brave

and powerful human he should in the future become: the Ubermenche.

But before we can get to the Nietzchian traumas, we must glance at a number of

other causes for the orthodox religionists growing dismay. Throughout the 19th century,

the situation for Christian orthodoxy got worse on all fronts. It seemed that some new

science was invented every decade. Geology became the cross most difficult to bear.

This one affronted personally most bishops of the literate Christian sects because it

questioned the divine revelation of the Bible itself. But the illiterate ones went on

singing hymns and, as the cliche has it, "couldn't care less." As for the historical

moment of creation, all sects which used the king James Bible were quite happy with

the dating of James Ussher, an Irish Protestant who became Chancellor of St. Patrick's

Cathedral in Dublin and after that Bishop of Meath, and finally Archbishop of Armagh

〔1625〕・ Havingimmense knowledge of languages, he used the begetting records in the

Old Testament to date all events recorded therein back to the week of creation which

occurred, so he said, in the year 4004 B. C. For almost two hundred years, everybody

was happy with Ussher's dates which were added along with pagination to all King

James Bibles. Then came geology.

Geology was fathered by a Scot named James Hutton. In 1795, his two-volume

work, The Theory of the Earth, spawned uniformatarianism and a lot of other isms

which drove some biblical scholars into a state of frenzy and even prompted a few

Anglican bishops to say, "Tut! Tut!" Hutton's idea was simple: geological changes in

the earth were brought about slowly by processes still going on. For a time his work

was overshadowed by catastrophism. This one was more acceptable to the bishops

because it didn't so clearly defy the book of Genesis. Then came Sir Charles Lyell.

Lyell, working along with William Smith, concentrated on the earth's crust and the

plant and animal fossils to be found there. His monumental tomes, The Principles of

Geology [1831-1833〕，ふscreditedthe orthodox "catastrophic" teaching about the age of the

earth and documented the gradualism theses of Hutton. Fortuitously, Charles Darwin

POUND VS. REDUCTIONIST ORTHODOXIES 143

took Lyell's book with him and studied it with enthusiasm during the voyage of the

Beagle. Lyell converted Darwin but was in turn converted by him after he read the

Origin of Species by Natural Selection 〔1859〕・ Lyell'ssecond book, The Antiquity

of the Earth 〔瑚3〕,went so for as to suggest that planet earth could be as old as

100, 000 years. The two of them brought many an orthodox bishop, among them the

great orator Samuel Wilberforce, close to apoplexy.

Samuel, the scion of William Wilberforce, carried on the tradition of a long line of

Wilberforces which for generations had been a burden to the few people in England

who actually indulged in thinking. Because he was a great orator in the days of great

oratory, he was nick-named "Soapy Sam." Orators even vied for adulation with the

great tragic actors of the age such as William Macready. At Drury Lane Theatre, Mac

would put on such a five minute performance in dying that he'd receive standing ovations

one wouldn't expect these days except at a hockey game. The audience would cheer and

scream, "Do it again Macready ! Do it again!" so that after a modest number of curtain

calls, he'd die all over again. The record is not clear on the maximum number of times

he died at one performance. What Macready was to Drury Lane, Soapy Sam was to

many an English cathedral. So when he challenged that arch-cohort of Satan, Charles

Darwin, to a public debate, public interest was tuned up high.

But in the meantime, the situation had gotten more and more complicated on all

geological fronts and climaxed in the "Omphalos" debate. One side of the argument

held that since Adam was created directly by God, he didn't have an omphalos 〔出e

belly-button from which everyone at birth is snipp叫〕 because he didn't need one. The

other side held that God could well have created Adam with an omphalos because he

created the universe and everything in it as if it were in process. This argument struck

a blow against the geologists because it said God created the earth as a planet in process.

For how long? As long as the geologists wanted it to be.

But these debates didn't get Soapy Sam riled. It was the monkey business in evolu-

tion seemingly espoused by Darwin that got him charged up. Of course Darwin didn't

espouse any such thing. In effect, he said, "All life descended from a common ancestry."

Perhaps he might have done better if he had said "ascended."

Finally on a hot June day in 1870, the long-awaited debate took place at Oxford.

Since that was clearly Wilberforce territory, the audience of dour-faced men and tittering

women were there in force to cheer the home team. As Soapy Sam looked out over

the congregation, he saw a sea of Japanese fans fluttering in the heat. Behind him on

the dais sat several men including Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley one of the most

respected scientists of the time. Since Darwin was a shy man and not a good speaker,

he accepted the challenge to a public debate only if Huxley could present his case.

Pre-publicity for the affair awakened international interest so that with an army of

reporters present Soapy Sam felt he was addressing the world. That idea really turned

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him on. Thus he gave a performance that slowly and inexorably built to a climax that

might have given even Macready pause. At a splendid oratorial peak, he turned from

the podium and slowly swept his right hand in a great flourish until it was pointing

directly at the culprit Darwin. Then, pausing until silence reigned and the audience

held their breath, he said: "Tell me, sir. From which branch of your family do you

trace your descent from the monkeys?" Since this was the clue for the climax, the

audience seemed to forget they were Englishmen and applauded with only limited re-

straint. Darwin looked down and squirmed with embarrassment. But Thomas Henry

Huxley smiled and said to the man sitting next to him, "The Lord hath delivered him

into my hands."

When his turn came, Huxley set forth simply and without oratorical flourish the

major evidence Darwin and other scientists had gathered and explained the hypotheses

about evolution the evidence demanded. Further, he said that as new evidence accu-

mulated in the future both he and Darwin expected those hypotheses to be adjusted

to accommodate it. Then he matter-of-factly took the opportunity the Lord had

provided. Without flourish, he turned to Soapy Sam and said, "As for you sir, I'd much

rather find common ancestry with the monkeys than use great talents in disservice to

the truth." At that one, the audience applauded Huxley even more than they had Soapy

Sam: a result which proves nothing except the fickleness of an audience. In any event

the debate was reported widely and because of the reputation of Huxley as a scientist

became a turning point in the public's interest in the ideas of evolution.

II

In the meantime on another front, the philosophers were also busy coming up with

new attitudes and premises that started shaking the western world out of its complacency

into various degrees of existential Angst. Soren Kierkegaard helped initiate this new

sickness of soul, perhaps abetted by his father who aged twelve endured a trauma that

changed his life and conditioned the atmosphere, Soren grew up in. His father had been

brought up as a hell-fire-yawns Christian. On the fatal day, he was tending sheep and

trembling with the cold. Suddenly in despair, he climbed a hill, shook his fist toward

the sky, and cursed God roundly. Tears of fear and repentance followed and lasted the

rest of his life. They say the guilt he felt when old about this act of blasphemy when

young cast a spell over his family and made his son the prophet of anxiety. Whether

it did or it didn't, his son tussled with Chrisian dogma for the rest of his life and came

to at least some conclusions Eliot, Pound, and Yeats (along with many others) would

agree with. And one in particular with which Pound would concur: One's chances of

being a good follower of Christ are contsiderably diminished if he joins a church and

indulges in the pride of righteousness and the pleasures of sectarian malice.


And with the most famous of all Kierkegaard's conclusions, the one concerning the

absurd, Pound would in part agree: that only one incarnation of the divine should have

taken place and that at one particular moment in history, at that particular place, with

all the attendant social, dynastic, economic, and cultural conflicts at a pitch, at an out-

post of empire, and that the divine being should be subjected to neglect, humiliation,

and finally torture and crucifixion is absurd. And still more that we should be required

to believe such an absurdity by an act of faith, with the punishing of hell certain if we

make a mistake, is even more absurd. But we must make such a leap of faith even though

it is a leap in the dark. This requirement leaves all men in a state of Ankt: The

Danish Ankt, is more or less the German Angst, the French angoisse, and the English

anguish: One translator spells it out as "Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto

Death." Pound would endorse the absurdity because on that and other grounds he had

concluded that revelation of the divine essence did not take place only at one moment

in history: rather it has been continuous from the beginning of creation in all societies

at all times and places. Please note Pound's statement: "Christ himself may very well

be a hero, but he is hardly to be blamed for the religion that's been foisted upon him."

Or "The adoption of Christianity as the Roman state religion had no more to do with

the teaching of Christ or with a search for verity than the acquisition of a new well in

Persia by the Standard Oil Co. has to do with Michaelson's ideas on the mathematics

of the eloctromagnetic field" 〔SP,56-57〕．

Both Kierkegaard and Pound came to react not only to the reductionist codifications

of sectarian orthodoxy but also to the reductionist theories of the major philosophers of

their times. Kierkegaard when young was a devotee of Hegel, but after thinking about

it long enough he included both Hegel and Kant among thinkers he lived to expose.

All the great philosophers accept some of the ideas of their predecessors. Kant defined

the Platonic idea as "Das Ding an Sich", a sort of unknowable something from which

time, space and causality flow. Hegel said of Kant, "Something there." Hegel thought

Kant was a bright fellow but didn't quite see how "Das Ding an Sich" works. Said

Hegel: It's from the eternal conflict between Being and Nothingness that existence flows.

Then came young Schopenhauer who for personal reasons wanted to demolish Hegel

with even more enthusiasm that did Kierkegaard. He said, in effect, "Yes, Kant was

bright enough to understand a little Plato, Hegel wasn't bright enough to understand

anything, but neither of them really understood what "Das Ding an Sich" is. In reality

it is the alldevouring, propulsive, destructive "will to live." In Schopenhauer the will

is the ultimate, irreducible, primeval principle of being, the source of phenomena, the

impelling force producing the whole visible world. The will existed outside time, space,

and causality, but ruthlessly demanded life and objectification. In its "in-itselfness" it

created through evolution higher and higher forms of life until finally it created man and

the intelligence of man. And man is a miserable helpless victim of this will. But it

146

made one mistake; it created finally the massive intelligence of Schopenhauer who caught

it at its nasty business and could say, "No more!"

Thus do we come to a question: "What kind of men were these great thinkers and

what kind of philosophical lives did they themselves live?" To find the answer we must

look beyond the encyclopedias and college textbooks. If we do that, right away we

begin to find some very queer people. Bluntly stated, the alleged major philosophers of

the 19th century had bizarre personalities, were physical weaklings, and suffered from

chronic illnesses. All were dyspeptic. These days dyspepsia is known as acid indigestion.

Then there was no silver lining, but the silver lining now is commercial. A multibillion

dollar industry flourishes by producing pills and potions to neutralize the acid. Unhappily,

having no such aid, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer suffered not in silence but screams

of anguish against the world and almost everything in it. To make things worse,

Kierkegaard suffered a melancholia that often became clinical. All of them looked upon

people as a species of vermin and upon women in particular as a necessary curse to

bear. The one bright spot is their attitude toward a few creatures in the animal king-

dom. If he were in a good mood, Kant became ecstatic over birds and was fond of a

particular bird that came to his window. Schopenhauer was fond of dogs. 1>

Of course the major tenets or their thoughts are either valid or not independent of

their personalities. But a reasonably informed person today would have to conclude all

of them constructed their systems on inadequate scientific data, in almost complete igno-

rance of the cosmos, and upon inaccurate as well as incomplete historical knowledge.

As for what they said or didn't say only experts, and life-long dedicated scholars such

as Beck or Kaufmann really knows. In the 60s, being puzzled over a Hegelian sentence,

I consulted a professor of philosophy who specialized in Hegel. He told me in graduate

school they'd cut a three page Hegelian sentence up into parts, toss them in a hat, and

paste them together at random. They seemed to make as good sense that way as any

other way. Another philosophy professor told me that Kant's categorical imperative was

really a restatement of the golden rule. By the time I got around to look into it myself,

I found it to be no such thing: "Do only that which you can will to be a universal

law" in Kant's own elaborations turns out to be a credo for retributive justice close to

the Old Testament's "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Said Kant. "The law

of punishments is a categorical imperative." That imperative, "requires that punishments

must be equal to crimes. Therefore, a person who insults another must be shamed in

punishment .... Someone who steals makes all property insecure, so he must be condemned

to convict labor, meaning, to temporary or permanent slavery. And if someone has

murdered,'he must die."'

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794〕゚ neof the few enlightened minds of the 18th century

and the author of Essay on Crime and Punishme氾〔176釘 madea good case against

the death sentence. This book prompted Kant to call the man's ideas "sentimentality"


and "affected humanity." Behind this Judgment was a series of deduced premises on

the basis of which Kant concluded that any program of tempering justice with mercy

would weaken the state: "It is the people's duty to endure even the most intolerable

abuse by supreme authority." Says BS: "In his view the formal condemnation to death

of a monarch, such as Louis XVI, overturned all concepts of right." Said Kant: "Regicide

is a crime that remains eternal and cannot be expiated, and appears to resemble the

crimes the theologians consider as sins that cannot be forgiven in either this or the

next world" 〔226〕・ Somethinkers believe that the slow evolution of the・human race

toward freedom and democracy is a positive expression of the divine spirit at work in

the world. Obviously Kant stood against such a process.

As for sex and "sexual crimes" he was just as rigid. Says BS: "He thought mas-

turbation to be'a violation of one's duty to oneself and ... certainly in the highest degree

opposed to morality.'The reluctance to name it, he said (without himself naming it),

shows that it is ... more degrading than suicide." This one is part and parcel of a well-

deduced, a priori, sequence of conclusions: Kant was firmly opposed to any idea that

pleasure involves good or evil. One must do what his brand of pure reason prescribes

no matter how painful. Thus one should not be astonished to find that Kant found it,

"astonishing how intelligent men have thought of proclaiming as a universal practical

law the desire for happiness ... " 〔227〕

Consistently, Kant believed education should equip one to endure as well as to know.

Thus for children, his credo seems to be a re-statement of "spare the rod spoil the child.''

Says BS: "Kant thought that working-class people, especially, spoil their children by

playing with them'like monkeys, singing to them, caressing, kissing, and dancing with

them.'" 〔pp.212〕・ A few other tenets about education and the arts include these:

Novels are harmful to both children and adults.

"Unrhymed poetry is prose gone mad.''

Love poetry is bad because it is "a mere play of sensations."

"Poets and musicians have no character because they reduce everything to feeling"

〔p.213〕．

Kant deplored friendship and brotherhoods because they tended to gather up power:

"Whoever has friends and power is very harmful" 〔216]. But he pretended himself to

have friends. In a letter to a mathematician named Kastner, he avowed his "unlimited

respect.''But in his own notes, published posthumously, he said Kastner was "invidious,

envious, hostile" and "even immoral" 〔215〕．

Kant's major concern in life was his health. He read avidly all medical reports and

studies he could obtain. From a curious chain of events he decided his own health

depended much on the weather. After that, one of his major concerns was to keep close

tabs on the climate. He believed "sweating" was bad, and endured all inconvenience to

keep from a drop of perspiration: "For the sake of his health, Kant took great pains

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never to sweat. During the heat of summer, he dressed lightly, and when ... 〔heseemed〕

•.. on the verge of sweating, he would stand still in a shadow ... until the danger had

passed. His thermometer, barometer and hygrometer were as important as the weather

vanes he kept in view outside his study window." But over time he was honest

about his state of mind and confessed to being a hypochondriac, paranoid, suicidal,

psychotic and at times insane⑫ 17〕・ Stillat other times he called all these characteristics

psychosomatic. Considering his physical presence, perhaps he was a hero to do as well

as he did: "He was barely five feet tall, his head was very large in relation to his body,

and his chest was very flat, verging on concavity. He was so thin he had to use special

springs, which I refrain from describing, to keep his stockings up" 〔218〕．

Perhaps he had good cause to believe profoundly in evil and to hold out little hope

for the human race. Said he, "If a man were to say and write all he thinks, there would

be nothing more horrible on God's earth than man" 〔221]. He even felt that evil power

flourished at the heart of "Das Ding an Sich." In the unknowableness of this thing-in-

itself lurked incarnate evil. Says BS: "Kant wanted to know more of himself than he

did, but he was afraid to. This thing-in-itself was not simply unknown, it was for-

bidden" 〔223〕．

Young or old Kant could not bear fools lightly. Although he preached against

dogmatism, he was himself dogmatic in practice, as a number of his oft-time visitors have

reported. One admirer wrote: "He cannot bear to hear others talk much, becomes im-

patient ... if anyone professes to know anything better than he does, monopolizes the

conversation, and professes to know everything about all countries and places .... Direct

contradiction insulted and ... embittered him." Says BS, "His dogmatism was not merely

the response of a man made inflexible by age and fame. In earlier years Kant was not

used to contradiction" 〔224〕．

When young, Kant had at least a restrained appreciation of women. In a book

written when he was 40, "he distinguishes between agreeable and charming women, he

speaks of the laughing looks that can disturb a man .... 〔andsay到 thatthe image of

the mother'remains the pattern all feminine figures in the future must more or less

follow so as to be able to stir the fanciful ardour."'But in his notes he wrote, "Female

beauty is only relative, the male absolute. This is why all male animals are beautiful

in our eyes, because they have relatively little charm for our senses" 〔229〕・ Fromhis

posthumous notes we might conclude that Kant became increasingly hostile to women

over the years. But that would be an error. He got increasingly hostile to men, too.

BS says, "I run a number of his notes together without comment," and then give us

these:

It is laughable that a man wants to make himself loved by a young woman by

means of understanding and great merits ... Woman does not betray herself easily

and therefore does not get drunk. Because she is weak she is sly ... Woman is


vengeful ... They say that the desire for honour is the last weakness of the wise.

I think that unless the wisdom is of the kind that presupposes old age, the love of

women is the last weakness ... Woman makes of man what she wishes. Formerly

she made heroes and now she makes apes ... The weakness of the man as against

the woman is no shame ... Everything depends primarily on the satisfaction of the

woman, but the man fixes the means for that ... The female sex has more feeling

and heart than character ... Men love the soul greatly, women the body. They believe

that the soul is good enough if only they can get it into their power.

These words only say that Kant was less an independent thinker than a product of his

age. After all some hundred years later Tennyson could write of woman as the lesser

man, as the "moon to the sun" or as "water is to wine."

Well, clearly, Kant was a long-suffering, sad-sack whose physical, emotional and

mental pains increased with age. But as he approached eighty and death, he still had

one springtime joy: the return of the warbl四〔Grasmuc知〕 who sang before his window

and in his garden. Says BS: "If his friend remained away too long, he said,'It must

still be very cold on the Apennines."'He didn't quite make eighty. Counting the

days with his friend Wasianski he grew unconscious and uttered his last words, "Das

IS gut.

If any of the giants among thinkers had it worse than Kant it must have been Hegel.

From birth he seems to have been a mass of warring contradictions. But he did have

his moments. Their rhythm suggests that his famous triad "thesis-antithesis-synthesis"

was a self analysis that directed his perception of world disorder. Certainly he didn't

like philosophy. Said he: "Philosophy is a formalized, hungry, and omnivorous ambiva-

lence" 〔240〕・ Again:"To be a philosopher is to be condemned by God" 〔236〕・ Sadly,

Hegel's fight to survive when young made him physically inept. His sister Christiana

who was closer to him and knew him better than anyone said, "He lacked all bodily

agility." No wonder. At age six he nearly died of smallpox which blinded him for

several days. At age eleven, he almost died of a disease that killed his mother. Says

BS, "During his student years he had tertian fever and spent a few months at home

where on his good days he read Greek tragedies" 〔230〕．

It seems that having little ability to deal with people, young or old, he came as did

Kant to spend most of his time dealing with his health and books. Says Christiana:

"As a boy of 3 he was sent to the German school, and in his 5th year to the Latin

school. At that age he already knew the first declension and the Latin words that go

with it; for our blessed mother had taught him" 〔231〕・ Laterin life he called childhood

the time of "natural harmony when the individual is at peace with himself and the

world." But as for the treatment of children, he seems to have taken a cue from Kant.

To spare the child from rigorous discipline is the root of all evil. Said Hegel: "To allow

children to do as they please, to be so foolish as to provide them into the bargain with

150

reasons for their whims, is to fall into the worst of all educational practices, such chil-

dren develop the deplorable habit of fixing their attention on their own inclinations, their

own peculiar cleverness, their own selfish interests, and this is the root of all evil" 〔233,

my emphasis〕．

In describing Hegel's personality, he himself and those who knew him longest and

best use words such as hypochondria, severe anxiety, depression, withdrawn, anxious,

nerve-wracked and melancholic. One biographer "raises the possibility that Hegel's de-

pression was psychotic, while a psychopathographer concludes that Hegel was clearly

schizoid" 〔235叫 SaysBS, "When Hegel wrote to his intended bride, whom he married

when he was fortyone, he found it necessary to excuse his'perhaps only hypochondriac

pedantry"'〔235〕・ Butany sadness or rage Hegel directed against himself was minor

compared to the outrage he could vent against others. The philosopher of contradictions

could bear, even less than Kant, contradictions. Says B. S.: "Nor could he usually bear

even to remain in the company of those who had contradicted him. His rages were

massive, his rebukes formidable, and his hate, once he thought it justified, was notably

thorough. His criticism easily lapsed into sneering and invective."

During the years of his greatest fame, scholars world-wide gathered to attend Hegel's

lectures at the University of Berlin. Sadly, Hegel was one of the world's worst speakers.

Said one, "His speech organ was not favorable to speaking." The minister who approved

the appointment, "inquired anxiously if his lecturing was still'obscure, muddled, nervous,

and confused'." Hegel gesticulated, waved his arms, and changed his voice a lot but, said

another: "his gesticulations and the changes in his voice did not seem in harmony with

what he was saying." Thus his speking came ever closer to his writing: "a draft of a

letter would assume a complex, crossed-out, fragmented, written around appearance."

Heine, who listened to him and read him more than most said: "To be honest, I rarely

understood him, and it was only through subsequent reflection that I attained an under-

standing of his words. I believe he really did not want to be understood: hence his

delivery so full of clauses .... 〔H誌〕 conversation was always a kind of monologue, sighed

forth by fits and starts in a toneless voice" 〔238〕・ BSsays the best account of Hegel

lecturing is given by his follower H. G. Hotho and he regrets he can give us only part

of it. In turn, I regret I can give only a part of what BS gives.

"Exhausted, morose, he sat there as if collapsed into himself, his head bent down,

and while speaking kept turning pages and searching in his long folio notebooks, forward

and back, high and low. His constant clearing of his throat and coughing interrupted

any flow of speech. Every word, every syllable detached itself to receive thorough em-

phasis from the metallic-empty voice .... "

It would almost seem as if he were trying to mimic the "seeds of destruction" working

his mind into a new synthesis. Or as if his manner were an exemplum of his matter.

Of his matter BS says in part :


The idea of destruction arises in it everywhere, but is everywhere constructive, for

it always culminates in construction; this construction, it is true, yields again to

destruction; but the whole process, which is constructive, contains destruction as no

more than one of its necessities. Negative is positive."

And so we go. The voices drone on and on and on.

As someone has said, beauty or the contrary probably exists in the eye of the be-

holder. Most people look upon alpine vistas as breathtaking, dramatic, and sublime, but

Hegel returned from visits there and reported "bleak mountains and monotonous, eternally

dead masses" 〔234〕・ Heseems to have looked upon the rest of the world and everything

in it with the same jaundiced eyes. Still, he is known as a philosopher of hope and

promise. Although I can't locate such a sentence, a priest once told me Hegel viewed

history as a process through which the divine spirit realized itself. Hegel died during a

cholera epidemic at the age of 61. Perhaps he found something along the way about

which he could say with Kant, "Das ist gut," but it would be hard to find lest it were

hedged in with a hundred conditions and provisos. At least, he has never been known

as the "philosopher of pessimism." That was left to Artur Schopenhauer, one of whose

avowed objects was the destruction of Hegel and all his works.

Artur Schopenhauer (1788ー 186① expressed his ideas about the works of Hegel,

which he called "Hegelry" in clear-cut words. It was "devoid of truth, clearness, intelli-

gence, and even of common sense." He denied Hegel "the title of thinker, philosopher

or even sophist." But he did concede that to German pedants, Hegel "was a kind of

artist, though of so low a grade that only his disciple, Rosenkranz, could sink below it"

〔256〕・ But,then, compared to his opinion of other philosophers that only makes Hegel

the worst of a worthless gang. A. S. called Fichte "a charlatan" and his philosophy

"nonsensical." He said Schelling "reasoned extravagantly and absurdly" and Rosenkranz

was not only stupid, but "no more than a miserable scoundrel." From A. S.'s point of

view only three thinkers besides himself deserved the title of philosopher: "Buddha, Plato,

and Kant." In fact his encounter with a 〔邸n-Ze叫 varietyof Buddhism and the Hindu

Upanishads melded with his ideas of Plato and Kant to spark Die Welt als Wille und

Forstellung (18認〕， anextraordinary book produced in white heat and black hate.

Although he allowed some merit to these thinkers, it is minor compared to the divine

merit he accords himself. Said A. S.: "Within the limits of human knowledge in general,

my philosophy is the real solution of the riddle of the world. In this sense it can be

called a revelation. As such, it is inspired by the spirit of truth-in the fourth book

there are even some paragraphs that one might consider inspired by the Holy Ghost"

〔256〕・ R.S. says about this, "For doubters, I repeat the last sentence in the language of

the writ itself." I give only the last phrase:... "die man als vom heilgens 〔出eemphasis

here and above is AS'到 Geisteeingeben konte."

Cleaply A. S. was either enthusiastically for or enthusiastically against other thinkers.

152

In another place he writes: "I will not mention the numberless monstrous and mad

compositions, which were called forth by Kant's works." They so much degenerated "our

German philosophy that we now see a mere swaggerer and charlatan. I mean Hegel,

with a compound of bombastical nonsense and positions bordering on madness, humbug

about a part of the German public, though but the more silly and untaught part, to be

sure .... " and so on 〔お7〕• This kind of thing A. S. published for the edification of the

public and thus wrote with some restraint. At the same "he kept a secret notebook"

in which he kept a record of his real opinions which, he said, were "too sharp and bitter

to be published during his lifetime." He told a few friends he wanted it published after

his death. But his biographer and executor, Gwinner, destroyed it. Probably, that was

a good idea⑫ 57].

With all this, one might be surprised how often A. S.'s opinions jibbed with those

of Hegel. For instance his opinions of women whom he called "the unfair sex". For

Schopenhauer, women were "childish, silly, and shortsighted-a kind of intermediate

stage between the child and the man." They were "mentally myopic and able to see

clearly only what was very close to them." They were the "unaesthetic sex" whose

main business was to befuddle males. Only when their minds were clouded by the

sexual impulse could a male "call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and

short-legged sex the fair sex" 〔257〕・ SaysBS: "Considering women's natural weapons

to be dissimulation and lying, he accused them of influencing men to conceal natural

reactions, to sham beliefs, to disavow ideas, to'blush not to be vile enough'.... " And

all this in order to bring forth "still another child destined to be taught to lie." All of

this came out when A. S. was fairly young. His misogyny increased or intensified with

age.

Perhaps his real recriminations should have been against himsolf, for no matter how

much he raged and roared, he ended up in the toils of one woman after another. Over

the years he had a dozen or so mistresses or friends, a few he helped support and he

even provided for one in his will.

No matter how much he hated Hegel, he shared with him as well as Kant many

personal idiosyncracies. A. S. suffered from isolation, loneliness, intense neurotic fears,

hypochondria, as well as a misanthropy that intensified with age: "In his maturity he

held almost any contact with people to be a contamination, a defilement." Gwinner wrote:

ヽヽ〔A.S.〕was inwardly lonely and pathologically anxious." When young A. S. looked

forward to the time when he would meet one decent human being. But as the years

went on the hope turned out to be vain: Said he, "I found nothing but miserable wretches,

narrow minds, base hearts, and dull wits; ... therefore my indignation at individuals grad-

ually gave way to a quiet contempt for the whole of mankind" 〔249〕．

Most of the labels in the psychiatrists handbook could be applied to Schopenhauer.

At times and in various degrees of intensity he suffered from paranoia, manic-depression,


hypochondria as well as numerous manias. From the age of six his fears were inten-

sified by a powerful imagination. Says Gwinner: "As a youngster, he was troubled by

imaginary illnesses and quarrels ... " For a while he thought himself consumptive. At

the outbreak of the war, he became convinced that he would be impressed into war

service" 〔249〕・ Whereverhe was he feared some local infection, so he was running from

one disease headlong into another: "The dread of smallpox drove him from Naples, of

cholera, from Berlin. In Verona he was seized by the idee fixe that he had taken poison

snuff. When, in 1833, he was about to leave Mannheim, an inexpressible feeling of

dread overcame him without any external cause."

If it weren't his health, it was plots of everybody and everything out to get him:

"For years he was persecuted by fear of criminal proceedings, fear of the loss of his

property .... If any noise was heard at night, he got out of bed and reached for sword

and pistol, which he kept permanently loaded." He employed a series of clever devices

such as the use of Latin, Greek, and English and the mislabelling of files and possessions

to mislead thieves. He called his securities files Arcana Medica: "To avoid drinking

infected water, he always carried a leather water-flask .... " 〔Als゚〕 he would lock a way

the stem and bowl of his pipe after each time he smoked it. He would never entrust

himself to a barber's razor." His fears extended not only into the immediate future but

into death: "Troubled by the danger of premature burial, he gave instructions that if he

appeared to die, his presumed corpse should be kept in an open coffin until his death

was beyond all doubt" 〔250〕．

For good reasons, A. S. often feared that he was either insane or likely to become

insane. Thus like a good student, he visited many insane asylums and tried to account

for it. Finally he came to a conclusion and said that "insanity was a kind of lapsing

of memory." Those who know a lot about such things 〔皿dthat doesn't include me〕紐y

A. S.'s work on the causes of insanity is "insightful." In fact same credit him with

being "the father of depth psychology." Here's a bit more A. S. on violent mental suf-

fering which

becomes insufferably great only in so far as it is a lasting pain, but as such it is

only a thought, and therefore resides in the memory. Now if such a sorrow, such

painful knowledge or reflection, is so harrowing that it becomes positively unbear-

able, and the individual is in danger of succumbing to it, then nature, alarmed in

this way, seizes on madness as the last means of saving life. The mind, tormented

so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of its memory, fills up the. gap with fictions,

and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength,

just as a limb affected by mortification is cut off and replaced by a wooden one.

In such a world the only thing a wise man could do is defeat the onerous will-to-

live by committing suicide. Either that or not get into life in the first place. He praised

any man who refused to conceive children. At one place he praised the intelligence of

154

a child that decided to be born dead. As for A. S. himself, he explained that he "had

avoided marriage out of pity for the son he might have had." The suicide issue put A.

S. in a sort of double-bind. If any one of sense would do it, why didn't he? Many a

romantic young man did. At the end of the century we had a repeat of the reaction to

Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. A number of dead bodies were found with

that popular book open on the bed. At the end of the last century, the scene was often

repeated, this time with A. S.'s book at hand.

Toward the end of the century we come to Nietzsche who brooded upon the theories

of his predecessors, particularly the defenders of Christian orthodoxy, and condemned

them all categorically: "I will write this eternal endictment of Christianity upon every

wall ... I will use letters which even the blind can see. I denounce Christianity as the

one great curse, as the one corruption, as the one great instinct for which no means are

too poisonous, treacherous, and small. I denounce it as the one dying disgrace of huma-

nity." Again: "The Christian concept of God-God as the deity of the sick, God as

spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that has ever been

attained on earth. Perhaps it represents the low-water mark in the evolutionary ebb of

the Godlike type. God degenerated into the condradiction of life, instead of being its

transfiguration and eternal yea."

Pound would agree with this statement except for one proviso. Since Saint Augustus

in the 5th century theologians had reduced not God (as the divine essnce) but Christian

orthodoxy to this dark state. With a nod toward Kierkegaard, Nietzache endorses the

notion of the absurd, and takes a leap, not of faith, but of total rejection:

"An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that his intentions

shall be understood by his creatures—could he be a God of Goodness? A God who

for thousands of years has permitted innumerable doubts and scruples to continue

unchecked as if they were of no importance in the salvation of mankind, and who,

nevertheless, announces the most dreadful consequences for anyone who mistakes

his truth, ―would he not be a cruel God if, being himself in possession of the truth,

he could calmly contemplate mankind, in a state of miserable torment, worrying its

mind as to what was truth?"

And again:

"He was a hidden god, full of secrecy. Verily he did not come by his son otherwise

than by secret ways. At the door of his faith standeth adultery. When he was

young, that God of the Orient, then he was harsh and revengeful and built himself

a hell for the delight of his favorites. At last, however, he became old, and soft,

and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a

tottering old grandmother. There did he sit shriveled in his chimney-corner fretting

on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of

his all-too-great pity."


III

To these summary reflections, a few more should be added. Pound believed.

1. The divine spirit seeking expression through creation has existed and still exists

in all matter and energy including what he called "the living rock." "The living

rock" vibrates with the divine.

2. In the fullness of time the miracle of life appeared. After his own experience

of the divine spirit, Whitman wrote, "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger

sextillions of infidels."

3. Different from the pantheists, Pound believed the divine expresses itself in

hierarchies. (1) A tree is alive but not conscious; (2) a mouse is conscious,

but not self-conscious; (3) man at a certain moment in evolution became

self-conscious, and finally god conscious. God uses man to express the divine

nature.

4. But man could neither understand the divine nor express it without words.

The impulse to create language continued for millions of years, still continues,

and will continue forever. The most recent 5000-year movement of the process

shows the divine spirit has already achieved some minor success: "In the begin-

ning was the word." Yes. But more important, then, now, and always.

5; One more which can be hinted at only obliquely. Since the second law of

thermodynamics was stated in the 1840s, much concern used to be cxpressed

because the universe is running down. In the end all heat and matter will be

evenly and at random distributed in space and all motion stop. Whither then,

the divine purpose or mankind? Is the dance of matter coming to a halt? But

against this process of entropy, another process can be detected. Robert Frost

notes it in "West-Running Brook": "the universal cataract of death/that spends

to nothingness-and unresisted, save by some strange resistance in itself."

And later:

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.

The brook runs down in sending up our life.

The sun runs down in sending up the brook.

And there is something sending up the sun.

It is this backward motion toward the source,

Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,

The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.

It is most us.

The later Schopenhauer had a pertinent perception to add to the 5 centuries of cause-

156

and-effect arguments he inherited: true all effects must be caused. But in the mind of

man a goal-oriented idea about the future can be a powerful pull to action and alter

events.

Imagine what might happen to one who has had a perception of light from behind

the veil. Moses was not spoken to in words. Those words had to be chosen from the

few available. to a tribal society which would be understood by that tribal society. It

was the same with Mohammed: he could feel his attacks, visions, or experiences coming

on and usually lay down somewhere and went into a trance-like state of physical anguish

during which he sweated a great deal. He spoke of the experiences as coming from

messengers of Allah but not in words. Still, afterwards he could express the sense of

the experience only in words. Again, they had to be words available in his tribal

vocabulary which would mean something to his tribal culture. As Rodinson put it, the

final effect was the same as with all great religious revelations: "It was not only Islam

that transformed the cultures of Moslem societies; their cultures also transformed Islam"

〔MR,XXXX〕・ Poundwould add: "And in the fullness of time reduced the original

visions to destructive rigid orthodoxies which demand burning, pillaging, and killing in

the name of Allah, a divinity we can assume is innocent of any such intent."

In the Age of Faith, Will Durant says: "(The pre〕困am比〕 Arab felt no duty or

loyalty to any group larger than his tribe, but the intensity of his devotion varied inver-

sely as its extent; for his tribe he would do with a clear conscience what civilized people

do only for their country, religion or'race'—i. e. lie, steal, kill, and die" 〔157〕・ The

post-Islamic Arab demonstrates its advanced civilization by lying, stealing, killing, and

dying with even greater enthusiasm. Whatever the nation or race or religion, these

evils, done in the name of the love of God and/or country, are noted with increasing

frequency toward the end of The Cantos:

That love be the cause of hate

something is twisted, 〔110/780〕

And 600 more dead at Quemoy-

they call it political. 〔110/781〕

"When one's friends hate each other

how can there be peace in the world" 〔115/794〕

"And of man seeking good,

doing evil." 〔115/794〕

As always, the high councils send youth out to die:

"the young for the old

that is tragedy" 〔117/801〕

But he has been saying the same thing over and over from the beginning. Canto

89 opens with an appeal to look again at human history and learn not to do evil in the

POUND VS. REDUCTIONIST ORTHODOXIES

name of good.

To know the histories

To know good from evil

And know whom to trust

Ching Hao

Chi crescera 〔恥cochi crescera li nostri amori〕

157

〔Look,here is one who will increase our lov蕊〕： A line from the Paradiso said by all

the souls who approach Dante in the sphere of Mercury. Pound's statement is simple:

If you want to know good from evil, you must know the histories: not all the mean-

ingless details of history, but just the luminous details: the gists and piths of history.

Where will you find such a history? Silly question: The Cantos. The Cantos is an

epic poem which contains those gists and piths.

In a word, the fields of legitimate inquiry must be extended to include, first, all

science and mathematics, and second, the whole history of mysticism. The creative uni-

verse is the primary document to study if one wants to know more about the unfolding

of the divine purpose. There may be a conflict between science and some religious

sects, but there can be no conflict between science and divine wisdom at work. One

must accept Pound's premise that the final mystery, the arcana, will be a state man

will finally enter. Not enter, but express. See what traps words can be? We have had

gleans and intimations about the light behind the veil. The history of mysticism contains

massive records of those who experienced brief glimmers and visions, but their contacts

with the ineffable could only be recorded in words which crack under the burden, decay

with imprecision, and will not stay still. To the man who has spent a lifetime in

Lapland, Yeats line on sunsets, "The dropping of the daylight in the west" may suggest

a cold yellow glow. He will never know what Yeats had in his mind when he wrote

it. Anyone who has not lived at the edge of a tropical sea will never know what

Pound meant by "sunset grand couturier," even though alerted by earlier lines on the

same page, "Tudor indeed has gone and every rose, /Blood-red, blanch white that in the

sunset glows."

For the divine light behind the veil Pound uses a recurrent image:

"Lux Einem, diafana.

Some light shines through the diafanous veil, but from our side we cannot see through

it to the source.

Where memory liveth,

it takes its state

Formed like a diafan from light on shade 36/177

The image occurs later in R. -D. and Thrones.

Lux in diafana

Creatrix

158

Oro 93/628

diafana

e monna Vanna ... tu mi fai rimembrar. 93/632

Queen of Heaven bring her repose

bringing light per diafana 95/644

Aestheticism comme politique d'eglise, hardly

religion,

that should bear him through these diafana 96/651

as light into water compenetrans•• …・ per plura diafana 100/722

In a note for his Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas wrote, "I read somewhere of a

shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances

to the moon to protect his flocks, replied:'I'd be a damn'fool if I didn't!'These

poem, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of

man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn'fool if they weren't."

These lines would not be out of place somewhere in Drafts and Fragments.

Beginning in Canto 74, Pound paraphrases Micah 4-5: "For all people will walk

every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our

GOD forever and ever."

On page 441: "each in the name of his god."

On page 443: "in the name of its god spiritus veni."

On page 454: "each one in the name of his god."

On page 487: "each one in the name of his god."

This cadence goes through several ritual transmutations until toward the end of the

poem every man's god is perceived to be, under whatever name, the same entity with

the same "intimate essence,"

On page 700, we read:

"Though he still thought: God of all men."

On page 788,

"For the little light and more harmany

Oh God of all men, none excluded

On page 772, the light behind the diafana is evoked by the key word in the moment

of catharsis of the Trachinniae:

which Pound renders.

What SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES.


The most baffling condition of the human species (why men who intend good do

evil) is stated simply and :finally once more at the end of the poem:

And as to why they go wrong

Thinking rightness.

These lines are in the context of others :

it coheres all right

even if my notes do not cohere

and a final small hope:

A little light, like a rushlight

to lead back to splendour!

In summary, my comments here have been intended to document the title, "Ezra Pound

vs. Reductionist Orthodoxies." In a word Pound avers that no orthodoxy, whether sci-

entifi.c, philosophical or religious can catch the cosmos or the divine essence in a net of

words. Any orthodoxy, particularly a religious one, has always become the banner for

war and destruction. This statement is as true today as it was in tribal times. The

thirty year w紅〔1618-1648〕加tweenProtestant and Catholics climaxed five centuries

of religious wars in the west. Pound notes most of them including the crusades here

and there in The Cantos. A similar pattern has developed with Islam. In the beginning

when Islam conquered all lands bordering the Mediterranean, it tolerated other religions.

Jews flourished after centuries of persecution and mass murder by the Church of Rome.

But in time there came the wars of succession between Shiite and Suni that go on today.

Today, wars in the name of orthodoxies flourish in Northern Ireland, and in the mid-

east, Jews, Shiites, Sunis, and Christians have almost destroyed Lebanon. In both places

no end is in sight.

Well as some wise man said, "There is nothing new under the sun." Fifty years

before Christ, Lucretius said in De Rerum Natura: "Tantum religio potuit suadere

malorum" 〔BK.1, 1. 105〕：ヽ 'Somany are the crimes to which religion leads." Of this

line, Voltaire said: "It will last as long as the world itself lasts."

ENDNOTES

1) Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers (New York: Oxford, 1980). Most of the data used

in this piece is taken from this book, hereinafter referred to as BS. Professor Scharfstein is the

most level-headed scholar I've encountered.

This is a version of a paper delivered at Kansai University on 31 October 1989.

c1989 Carroll F. Terrell

Documents

POUND VS. REDUCTIONIST ORTHODOXIES€¦ · geological fronts and climaxed in the "Omphalos" debate. One side of the argument held that since Adam was created directly by God, he didn't